Exeter Hosts Chess Tournament

With fingers itching to make the "checkmate" move, chess players from all over New England gathered in Grainger for the Exeter Chess Club’s first invitational, held this past Sunday.Having planned months in advance, the Exeter Chess Club hosted its first-ever tournament and extended an invitation to Andover, Lawrenceville, St. John’s Preparatory School and other schools from around the area, all of whom attended. With seven teams from six different schools, this tournament brought students from all around New England to the Exeter campus to compete in this highly competitive board game, leading to an outstanding turnout for the chess club’s first invitational.Lillian Betke-Brunswick, a math intern and a chaperone for the competition, commented on the overall success of the tournament."The conference was great," she said. "Margaret Zhu did a fabulous job as tournament director, and every team had a lot of fun."The competition was a great way for competitive chess players to gauge their competition in other schools."Competing against schools from all over, you could really see just how many different skill levels other kids had," prep Joseph Bartkovich said. "There were people there I was easily better than, and people that were miles ahead of me. A tournament like this really puts things in perspective."Rather than focusing on the competitive aspect of this tournament, some Exonians found solace in playing chess against many different people."Outside of the weekly chess club meetings, the Exeter team didn’t practice a great deal for the tournament," lower Ellen Xiang, who participated and won first place in the tournament, said. "Many of our players have had prior experience in tournaments, so we didn’t focus as much on preparation, just on having a good time."Organizing and advertising the event proved to be a very time-consuming challenge. Deciding on the format of the tournament and the date and venue, procuring food and drink, ordering new chess sets, clocks and trophies, learning how to use a tournament pairing program and continuously maintaining contact with interested schools to make sure registration forms were filled out were just a few of the things that the chess club had to prepare."Because this was the first time the Exeter Chess Club hosted a tournament, there was a lot organizing to do and just getting the word out," Xiang said. "Since we didn't know which prep schools had chess teams and which didn’t, we made a list of all the boarding schools we could think of and contacted them all. We encountered some hurdles, such as finding chaperones for our event and teams dropping out at the last minute, but the tournament was tons of fun and worth all the energy put into making it happen."David Zhao, who worked as part of the set-up crew, hopes to advertise this event better in years to come."The only problem was that we didn’t publicize enough, so no one from Exeter showed up to watch," he said. "Next year we intend to do this again, but invite more schools, schedule the tournament at a different date so it won’t conflict with other tournaments and advertise the event."Despite the hours of work required to help pull this event together, students felt the competition had a favorable outcome."Overall it was a great success," prep Christopher Vazan said. "I look forward to many more successful years, and I hope future co-heads of the club do as good a job organizing the tournament as they did this year.""The response from the participating schools was very positive, and we hope to expand and make the Exeter Chess Invitational an annual tournament during the spring," Xiang said. "The club is looking towards participating in more regional and national tournaments in the years to come. We hope to get enough funding to send a team to Nationals in the future."